Is your 3PL holding out on you?Download this e-book to discover 10 powerful strategies for immediately improving your supply chain efficiency and effectiveness. Is your 3PL sharing them with you? If not, maybe you should contact Landair. We make a guaranteed commitment to add value.
Click for more information.

Join our panel of leading economic and transportation analysts as they share their exclusive insight on where rates are headed and the issues that will be driving those rate increases over the next 12 months.

Step 3: Align interests
This step entails designing and documenting how a company and the service provider will work together to achieve the desired outcomes.

In basic terms, this is the part of the process where both companies should document, with as much precision as possible, how the outsourcing company and the service provider will work together to achieve the desired outcomes. It’s the first pass at the future vision for how the two companies will communicate, collaborate, and innovate together to achieve the best results.

This brings us to our sixth tip: Identify risks before you transition the work. While it’s not clear if the parties took the time to align interest, we have to assume that the parties—at least the service provider—likely did not do a proper risk assessment.

We hypothesize that if interests were aligned and a proper risk assessment was performed in the relationship, Armstrong would not have stated “it was evident pretty much from the start that it wasn’t going to work.” Obviously the parties got out of the gate on the wrong foot.

Step 4: Establish the agreement
Vested Outsourcing is based on reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO) versus simply the costs of the transactions performed by the service provider. As such, 3PL pricing models should include incentives that will be used to reward the outsource provider when they achieve the desired outcomes and TCO targets.

This brings us to our seventh tip: Establish a pricing model with incentives that encourage service providers to put skin in the game and invest in your business to close the gaps. As mentioned before, the Armstrong case study cited that “the arrangement was not meeting Armstrong’s established costs and service goals.”

One approach they could have taken was what we call a “fee at risk” pricing model. This is when a service provider charges below market rates for service—but then is rewarded with incentives for delivering results against the desired outcomes. The more successful both parties are, the more profit the service provider makes, often two to three times market rates. A true win-win because the companies become vested in each other’s success. The more successful the company is, the more success the service provider is.

Recent Entries

When an industry is changing rapidly, companies must adapt in order to survive. In this whitepaper, a global publisher was seeking a partner that could mitigate risk and build a platform flexible enough for their shifting customer expectations. The solution enabled the company to rewrite their operations game plan and transform their supply chain.

While it is already reaping myriad benefits from ORION (On-Road Integrated Optimization and Navigation), a proprietary routing platform for its drivers rolled out in late 2013, transportation and logistics bellwether UPS announced big plans for the technology this week.